He set foot on the porch steps. Then he turned
back. A faint flush stole up in his sun-browned
face. He held out his hand.

“Shall we cry quits?” he asked. “Shall
we shake hands and forget it?”

Gower rose to his feet. He did not say anything,
but the grip in his thick, stubby fingers almost made
Jack MacRae wince,—­and he was a strong-handed
man himself.

“I’m glad you came to-day,” Gower
said huskily. “Come again—­soon.”

He stood on the porch and watched MacRae stride down
to the beach and put off in his dinghy. Then
he took out a handkerchief and blew his nose with
a tremendous amount of unnecessary noise and gesture.
There was something suspiciously like moisture brightening
his eyes.

But when he saw MacRae stand in the dinghy alongside
the Blanco and speak briefly to his men, then
row in under Point Old behind Poor Man’s Rock
which the tide was slowly baring, when he climbed up
over the Point and took the path along the cliff edge,
that suspicious brightness in Gower’s keen old
eyes was replaced by a twinkle. He sat down in
his grass chair and hummed a little tune, the while
one slippered foot kept time, rat-a-pat, on the floor
of the porch.

CHAPTER XXI

As it Was in the Beginning

MacRae followed the path along the cliffs. He
did not look for Betty. His mind was on something
else, engrossed in considerations which had little
to do with love. If it be true that a man keeps
his loves and hates and hobbies and ambitions and
appetites in separate chambers, any of which may be
for a time so locked that what lies therein neither
troubles nor pleases him, then that chamber in which
he kept Betty Gower’s image was hermetically
sealed. Her figure was obscured by other figures,—­his
father and Horace Gower and himself.

Not until he had reached the Cove’s head and
come to his own house did he recall that Betty had
gone along the cliffs, and that he had not seen her
as he passed. But that could easily happen, he
knew, in that mile stretch of trees and thickets,
those deep clefts and pockets in the rocky wall that
frowned upon the sea.

He went into the house. Out of a box on a shelf
in his room he took the message his father had left
him and sitting down in the shadowy coolness of the
outer room began to read it again, slowly, with infinite
care for the reality his father had meant to convey.

All his life, as Jack remembered him, Donald MacRae
had been a silent man, who never talked of how he
felt, how things affected him, who never was stricken
with that irresistible impulse to explain and discuss,
to relieve his troubled soul with words, which afflicts
so many men. It seemed as if he had saved it
all for that final summing-up which was to be delivered
by his pen instead of his lips. He had become
articulate only at the last. It must have taken
him weeks upon weeks to write it all down, this autobiography
which had been the mainspring of his son’s actions
for nearly two years. There was wind and sun in
it, and blue sky and the gray Gulf heaving; somber
colors, passion and grief, an apology and a justification.